FIVE YEARS AGO, the defeat of the Taleban and the end of their pernicious ban on girls and women teachers going to school brought hope back to Afghanistan.
With the move to democracy, the main symbol of regeneration lay in the dream of educating all children - girls and boys. After decades of war, first against the Soviets, then between the Taleban and Northern Alliance, large areas of Kabul looked like Dresden at the end of the second world war.
House walls were reduced to stumps of mudbrick, busted tanks littered potholed streets, many footpaths and buildings were marked out of bounds because they had not been cleared of mines or other unexploded ordinance.
While tank crews camped lazily on the side of the road, ready to rumble if called into action, there was excitement in the air as thousands of schoolchildren came thronging through broken school gates at the end of March, desperate to start learning again. Nothing symbolised the feeling that at last there was a future beyond fighting than the sight of children packed into smashed-up classrooms, sitting cross-legged in neat rows, straining to hear their teacher.
At Soofi Islam School in central Kabul, for instance, few of the classrooms had ceilings, none had windows to keep out the scouring dust and wind and most had gaping holes in the walls.
At Habibia Secondary School, every foot of the rendering was pock-marked with bullet holes and there were shell holes on every floor bigger than the pupils. Parts of the playground were out of bounds because they had not been checked for unexploded shells and mines. In any other country it would have been closed as a major safety hazard but Habibia was packed with 2,600 pupils a day, six days a week.
'When they drove the Taleban out, I came back to school,' said Grade Ten student Hussein Sultani, 21, who spent four years as a refugee in Iran. 'But we have no glass in the windows, no chairs, no tables and we sit on the floor.'